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Just one year ago, four organizations renowned for promoting free speech on college campuses issued a dire warning: The independence of college media is under attack. The report—called, appropriately enough, “Threats to the Independence of College Media”—detailed efforts by college administrators to silence student journalists, especially when those journalists wanted to publish stories that could put colleges in a bad light. Often, college officials sought the power to censor student journalism.

The four organizations—the American Association of University Professors, College Media Association, Student Press Law Center and National Coalition Against Censorship—determined that one of the best bulwarks against suppression of students’ free speech, whether digital, broadcast or print, was a well-trained media adviser: an educator who could go to bat for them.

“This issue impacts millions of educators and students,” Kelley Lash, the immediate past-president of College Media Association, said in a press release at the time. “Student media participants, and their advisers, should not be threatened or punished due to the content of the student media. Their rights of free speech and free press must always be guaranteed.”

As CMA president, I hear constantly about people in power trying to silence students, and throughout 2017, media students faced one threat after another. It’s hard to know whether officials who oppose students’ free speech are growing in number or whether, in the digital age, we’re simply hearing more about them. Either way, we must remain vigilant as educators and advocates.

Fortunately, if 2017 has taught us anything, it’s that our students and their advisers are willing to fight for the cause.

Protecting College Media on Many Fronts

In November, student editors at Indiana University protested the surprise removal of their longtime adviser, Ron Johnson, and asserted that the move threatened their editorial independence. In December, the Texas State University president spoke out against a controversial opinion piece in the student newspaper, and the student body president threatened to cut off funding because he found the opinion to be offensive.

But small successes accumulated, too. Editors of the student-run Kentucky Kernel waged a legal battle with the help of the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) against Kentucky State University, which wouldn’t release documents relating to a professor accused of sexual harassment—and those student journalists scored a legal victory. Students and the adviser at Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey spoke out after the school shuttered the paper in response to sexually charged content; following an official censure from College Media Association, Saint Peter’s officials enacted changes sufficient enough for CMA to remove the censure.

These victories stand out in a dynamic year that started with student media covering Donald Trump’s inauguration, from the perspective of blue states and red states alike, and ended with inklings of societal change in the form of the #metoo movement. When it came to the latter, college DJs sought to expose hard truths in their own spaces. In one noteworthy case, West Virginia University DJs went on a three-hour strike after students said they had been sexually harassed by the university employee who manages the radio station.

Protections for New Voices

One of the most encouraging developments of 2017 was the spread of the New Voices movement, a statehouse-by-statehouse initiative designed to strengthen First Amendment protections for high school and college students that had been stripped away by the controversial 1988 Supreme Court decision Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.

In that case, the Court voted 5-to-3 to permit prior review in high school publications, effectively allowing high school principals to censor students newspapers at will. Lower court judges later tried to apply this standard to public colleges.

The New Voices initiative has involved hundreds of students and educators nationwide lobbying state senators, representatives and governors to increase scholastic free-speech protections at the state level for secondary schools and colleges alike.

Jenna Majeski, editor-in-chief at the Woodstock Union High School newspaper in Woodstock, Vt., testifies in April before the Vermont House of Representatives judiciary committee in favor of new free-speech protections. High school and university students nationwide have teamed up with their media advisers, lawyers at the Student Press Law Center and other free-press advocates to enact legislation that prevents prior review by school administrators. (Photo: Chris Evans)

This year has been the single best year so far for New Voices. Governors in three states—Nevada, Vermont and Rhode Island—signed New Voices bills into law, bringing the number of states with this level of scholastic free-speech protection to 13. The movement has earned praise from journalists far and wide.

“I’m encouraged to see so many students getting deeply involved across the country,” said Steve Listopad, a pioneer of the movement and media adviser at Henderson State University in Arkansas. “At JEA/NSPA this year in Dallas, I was bombarded with questions and interviewed dozens of times on the subject. The campaign might seem arcane to many students, but common understanding of its importance is certainly growing.”

Free-Speech Advocates Take Center Stage

New Voices has been a passion project for free-speech advocate Frank LoMonte, who started the campaign while serving as SPLC director, a position he held for nearly a decade and in which he worked tirelessly to provide free legal help to college journalists under fire. In July 2017, LoMonte left the nonprofit agency to relocate to the University of Florida, where he now heads the Joseph L. Brechner Center for Freedom of Information.

Amid this transition, CMA created the Frank LoMonte Ethics in Journalism Award, which will honor journalists, advisers and news organizations that perform in an outstanding ethical manner. The first person to receive the award was longtime broadcast journalist and professor Ernabel DeMillo, who lost her position as media adviser at Saint Peter’s University after her students published that sexually charged material that university officials found so objectionable. Demillo’s defense of her students’ First Amendment rights helped roll back the school’s censorship efforts.

After LoMonte’s departure, SPLC hired human rights attorney Hadar Harris as its executive director. Harris has a long track record of crusading for truth and justice, including holding the directorship at both the Northern California Innocence Project and the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law.

In a statement on the SPLC website, Harris said the organization’s work has never been more essential.

“Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are core to democratic society,” she said in the statement, “and student journalists play a fundamental role in promoting and protecting both.”

As 2017 has shown us, those protections are needed more than ever.

As president of College Media Association, Chris Evans leads a national organization of 700 college media advisers who seek to develop strong, student-led media programs at colleges and universities across North America. At the University of Vermont, Evans developed an award-winning student-run media program consisting of online, print, broadcast radio and TV organizations.

The post College Media Year in Review: Defending Free Speech for Students appeared first on MediaShift.

Another week, another mass shooting in America. In addition to being heartsick, angry and frustrated, I am, as usual, distressed by the way mass shootings are reported in the breaking news cycle. I think of the survivors and the loved ones of victims of Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora, the Pulse and all the others, knowing in addition to the pain they’re feeling as they’re forced to relive their own personal horror, they’re watching journalists make the same mistakes over and over.

Reckless Focus on Killer

First, there is something desperately wrong with the scramble to answer the question “why” by reporting random facts about the killer in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. If ever there were a case for “slow journalism,” it is right after some maniac opens fire and kills a bunch of people. It produces some of the most useless, speculative and perhaps even reckless reporting news organizations do.

Here’s what we learned about the killer in Las Vegas in the first 24 hours after the massacre: He owned real estate. He liked to gamble. He was divorced some time ago. He was wealthy. The top contender for most useless tidbit: One source offered the unlikely observation that he didn’t think the killer had ever before fired a weapon.

In previous mass shootings, stories included that the killer had “a funny walk.” Or was recently dumped by his girlfriend. Or had a terrible temper. I can’t count the number of times news organizations have reported with a straight face that the killer “kept to himself.”

Somewhere along the way, the “who” and the “why” are conflated. The random facts satisfy readers’ impotent curiosity for details and probably provide some salve for our unconscious fear that we or someone we love could be the next victim. If we fixate on some aspect of the killer or the situation that is unusual — the telling detail — we can persuade ourselves that there is surely a “type” of person who is capable of doing something like this and, improbably, that we can avoid contact with this type. Or keep this type of person out of our country, if he happens to be Middle Eastern. Or keep this person locked away, if they’ve been described as having a mental illness.

In doing so, we arm ourselves with mental shields against the randomness of deaths by real weapons. They allow us to sleep, to go out in public, to send our kids to college, to go see a movie in a theater or an open-air concert, or to spend an evening at church Bible study. It’s a kind of inversion of the psychological mechanism that causes us to blame the victim. If we can simplify, stereotype, reduce the details into a kind of diagram of propensity, we might be safe.

For the families of the murdered, this kind of reporting stirs particular outrage because it focuses so much energy and attention on the killer. Highlighting his apparent normalcy (“He was the nicest guy in the world”) is a denial of the grim facts these families live with for the rest of their lives: This “average Joe” armed himself to the teeth with the intent to kill as many people as quickly as possible, evaded any suspicion, and then opened fire on a crowd out for an evening of fun and music. Imagine one of those strangers was someone you love.

Fame as Unintended Consequence

Another important part of the problem is that this kind of reporting feeds into the 15-minutes-of-fame theory. We make celebrities of killers by reporting endlessly and exhaustively on the minutiae of their lives, plans and “manifestos,” and by publishing humanizing photographs or videos of them. Doing so, we inspire the next killer and the one after that. The bereaved families who launched the “No Notoriety” campaign make this argument persuasively and cite anecdotal evidence that suggests some mass killers have been inspired by those that came before them, especially the two young men who killed 13 people at Columbine High School. Though social scientists are just beginning to study the “contagion effect” of mass shootings, the best evidence to date suggests a slight uptick in mass killings after a major event lasting for up to two weeks. “No Notoriety” makes enough sense to have gained ground with big news organizations like CNN.

People in Las Vegas take part in a vigil honoring victims of a mass shooting targeting concert goers at a country music festival near the Mandalay Bay Hotel on Oct. 2, 2017. (Photo:“VOA Vegas Vigil” by C. Mendoza / VOA is in the Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Some reporting is jaw-dropping in its thoughtlessness. Winner of the “Bottom of the Barrel” award in this category is The New York Times, which published a photograph of the inside of the killer’s hotel room complete with annotations showing the positions of weapons arranged to maximize convenience and destruction. The other graphics in the package explained the logistics. It’s a pretty complete how-to for a copycat, but it doesn’t do anything to further journalism’s central mission to serve the public.

Perhaps, though, there is a why. Law enforcement agencies are responsible for answering that question, with the help of the public. Last week there were numerous stories about investigators seeking anyone with information about what was on the killer’s mind. They waited for his girlfriend to get back from the Philippines, hoping in vain she might shed some light on the why. It could be that some of the information they uncover will help law enforcement agencies and us, the deeply uneasy public, prevent future mass shootings.

Relentless Searches for Meaning

But what if there’s only the act and what it signifies: a grandiose act of violent destruction and, usually, self-destruction. There’s a growing theory that mass shootings are a specific act of suicide. Maybe the guy in Las Vegas, whose name is meaningless, just wanted to top the scoreboard with the largest body count. CBS News’ story about the number of dead in the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history — they’re increasing, by the way — shows a fairly steady uptick in the number of victims. In Las Vegas, the man with the guns killed 58 people (and wounded more than 500 – CBS’ reporting leaves out the number of those left with catastrophic injuries, and that’s a serious omission). The Orlando shooting ended the lives of 49 people.

We’re not helping by referring to the killer as “the shooter.” The term has operational value for police and others during a shooting as they look for the source of gunfire and to bring an end to it. But, now headline writers and reporters have adopted its use, and that’s unfortunate because it carries a tinge of glamor. It euphemizes the results of the person’s acts, which are agonizing and terrible deaths. Calling a mass killer a “shooter” is like calling a shooting victim a “target.” It has the ring of the video game world. It makes me wonder if we’re too desensitized to the true human cost of violence. The proliferation of guns and murder narratives in entertainment media adds to this numbing and is creeping into the way we write about actual violence.

Virginia Tech students read the school newspaper in Blacksburg, Va., in 2007, the year a student killed more than 30 before killing himself. (Photo: MANNIE GARCIA/AFP/Getty Images)

The people who commit these terrible crimes seem to be pretty ordinary guys (yes, guys), and they want attention. And they get it. From us. Reporting on the victims still lags far behind the reporting on the perpetrators of these crimes. It’s out there, and news organizations are committing more resources to memorializing the people who died, as in this piece from the L.A. Times that ran on the paper’s front page on Saturday.

Sadly, it’s unlikely to stop the next one.

How Journalism Should Respond

What we should be doing is thinking carefully about the language we use in the stories we write and broadcast, especially in headlines and visuals. We should be deeply thinking about the purpose of our journalism. If a possible answer to the question why begins to emerge in the weeks after a mass shooting, we should report on it as we continue to follow up on the aftermath for the survivors.

I have a little laminated card on my desk that I hand to my students sometimes when they get lost in a story. On it is a list of questions, and the first one is, “What is the point of my story?” Editors and producers, anchors and reporters, photojournalists and graphic artists should be challenging themselves and their newsrooms to justify the content they’re shoveling onto their sites and into their broadcasts after a mass murder (yes, it was a mass murder, though the killer didn’t stick around to stand trial).

We should be doing what we can to reduce the possibility that we’ve been a party to creating a risk analogous to suicide contagion. Most news organizations have had their consciousness raised about the risks of reporting on suicide as having a single cause, on how exactly people take their lives, and how we characterize them afterward. The World Health Organization offers guidelines on reporting suicide in ways that minimize the risk for contagion. ­­It’s past time we applied similar caution to reporting on mass shootings and the people who do the killing.

Katherine Reed is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism who teaches reporting and a course on covering traumatic events. She is a former fellow of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and has trained educators and investigative reporters on trauma at professional conferences.

The post How Educators Can Discuss Journalists’ Coverage of Violence appeared first on MediaShift.

Facial recognition

The public is becoming more comfortable with having computers track their faces. Facebook introduced facial recognition with “tagged” photos in 2010, and now Apple is using the technology as a security measure on its latest iPhone.

However, paired with computer learning and large databases, facial recognition could lead to dangerous profiling.

For example, Stanford researchers recently determined that facial recognition was able to predict whether an individual was gay, according to this Washington Post article. Facial recognition software at this level can then be seen as a threat to the right not to divulge sexual preference, one of the most basic rights when considering free speech.

Surveillance cameras used in concert with facial recognition – either by law enforcement or corporations – also could cause people to rethink where and when they assemble and protest. Take, for example, the Churchix facial recognition software that tracks attendance at religious services by scanning the crowd and running a check in a database of faces. The company advertises the software can be used by “event managers who want to track event attendance, or by anyone who wants to identify known guests from live or recorded video.”

Artificial intelligence

As artificial intelligence improves, algorithms are developing their own speech. Does a robot or a Twitter bot have First Amendment rights?

Consider news stories written by algorithms. The Washington Post used Heliograf, a news bot, to cover the Rio Olympics in summer 2016. They used it again in the 2016 election to cover more than 500 Senate, House and gubernatorial races. Does the same press protection afforded human journalists extend to Heliograf?

Image by Pixabay/CC0

There are also computer programs that interact with humans, such as Microsoft’s “Tay,” which in 2016 was designed to chat with and learn from millennials. The only problem: Internet users instead turned Tay into a racist troll. That kind of speech is protected for humans, but what about for non-humans?

Legal scholars Toni M. Massaro and Helen Norton note that other non-humans, such as corporations, have already been extended First Amendment rights. That was solidified in the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision. But those corporations are still led by humans. With computers and programs, many questions remain.

Doxing

Doxing is the revealing of personal information without the person’s consent. It has been an integral part of the digital environment since the early 1990s. One early example was Neal Horsley’s “Nuremberg Files” website, on which he published names and addresses of abortion providers. Often cited as one of the first instances of doxing, the site is credited with inciting violence toward some of the doctors listed.

With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, doxing ascended to a new level. A recent example illustrates how far it has come. Of the many pictures made during the recent Charlottesville protests, some were used to identify participants as white nationalists. At least one person identified on Twitter lost his job as a direct result of being outed.

Community censorship has been around for as long as the country itself, and some might celebrate the fact that an individual espousing hateful views has been justifiably punished. However, the same Twitter feed misidentified another individual, damaging the reputation of someone not involved.

Digital technology has given everyone the ability to practice freedom of the press as their First Amendment right. The journalistic practice of verification, however, has been ignored by those doxers to the detriment of that freedom.

Drones

The law is pretty clear that pictures can be taken while standing on public property. But what about the air above? As drones become more prevalent tools for newsgathering, this question keeps arising.

The FAA has classified public and commercial airspace, but federal law pertaining to flying over someone else’s property is meager at best, and there are few state statutes or regulations pertaining to the issue.

One of the most cited examples goes back to a 1946 case where it was established that 86 feet was the benchmark separating private airspace from public. This, however, was never meant as a ruling to determine flight space for flying cameras.

Equally concerning, from a First Amendment perspective, are content-based restrictions on drone photography. One such issue came up in New Jersey, where a proposed law would have made it illegal to take drone photos of “critical infrastructure.”

The debate is often focused on safety issues, such as drones damaging the power grid or causing other potential harm. But new drones are much smaller, and have obstacle avoidance capabilities, so the safety factor may soon be a moot point. Also, drones are already being used for infrastructure inspection in several industries. It seems intrusive on the rights of journalists, then, to preclude rather than simply regulate their use.

Internet of Things

Now that your cell phone, television, computer and even refrigerator can be listening devices, there have been increasing legal questions surrounding the data collected from the items.

For example, in early 2017, Amazon argued that sound recordings from one customer’s Echo are protected by the First Amendment. The Echo, through a virtual assistant named Alexa, listens to voice commands in order to perform searches, play music and complete other tasks. The information and recordings gathered during this process were requested by Arkansas lawyers for use in a murder trial.

Amazon eventually released the data with the defendant’s consent. However, the company’s initial arguments against the release claimed that Alexa has First Amendment rights, too.

“Alexa’s decision about what information to include in its response, like the ranking of search results, is ‘constitutionally protected opinion’ that is ‘entitled to full constitutional protection,'” the lawyers wrote, citing a 2003 case dealing with search engine results.

Amazon’s lawyers also cautioned against the chilling effects of government access to search history.

“At the heart of the First Amendment protection is the right to browse and purchase expressive materials anonymously, without fear of government discovery,” Amazon’s attorneys wrote.

Big data

It’s not just data collection from listening devices and facial recognition that prompt concerns. Information collected over time has more power once combined. The risks increase with big data collection of cell phone, shopping, travel and communication transactions.

Image by Pixabay/CC0

This is not a new concern. The Supreme Court, in the 1989 DOJ v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press case, ruled that information in FBI rap-sheets should not be released to the public because it could be a violation of personal privacy. Individually, all the information contained in the rap-sheet is public. But once it is combined, it becomes something different, the court ruled.

Interestingly, the Reporters Committee decision focused on the release, not the collection, of dossiers. But groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are concerned with the collection, too. In early 2017, EFF urged data brokers – companies that collect and sell personal data – to protect information from government request.

EFF and others are supporting a proposal in California to prevent local government agencies from releasing data to the federal government when the information could be used to create lists or registries of people based on religion or ethnicity.

Brave New World

The rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to assemble, publish and speak freely are being truncated by omnipresent technology. The fear of loss of one’s livelihood or life for speaking out, joining a group or practicing the “wrong” type of medicine, narrows the conversation needed to sustain a healthy democracy.

As case law develops around these issues, it’s important to help students critically think about the implications of evolving technology.

Jodie Gil and Vern Williams are assistant professors of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. 

The post How New Technology Like AI, Drones and Big Data Can Limit the First Amendment appeared first on MediaShift.

Drones are, indeed, a thing in journalism, and they’re only going to grow. This leaves educators — already exhausted from keeping up with nonstop innovations from podcasting to Snapchat — wondering how to deal with this new tool. Do we all really have to now develop pilot and airspace expertise in addition to AP Style, interviewing, law, ethics and a dizzying array of platform options?

The short answer is: “No.” Not every J-School instructor needs to be licensed to fly a drone. But, I would argue, every one of us needs to understand drones as a tool and a trend, and every program should be thinking now about where and how we can incorporate them in our curricula.

Drones in the Airspace and the Newsroom

When Congress set the Federal Aviation Administration on a course to figure out how to safely incorporate UAVs in the national airspace, they did so in part because civilian drones were something of an inevitability, but also because they were certain to become big business. Some analysts argue drones in the U.S. could be a $100 billion concern by 2020. Drones offer safety, convenience and cost efficiency to industries well beyond journalism. Insurance companies are interested in them to verify damage involved in claims. Golf course managers can deploy them to manage watering practices. And meteorological researchers can monitor weather with them.

Newsrooms can use them for a whole host of reporting endeavors. Take recent hurricanes as an example. A news organization could use a drone to:

• capture still and video images, such as surveying damage from flooding
• live-stream video, such as covering a post-disaster fundraising event with Facebook Live
• map terrain, such as documenting loss of costal areas to rising sea levels
• sensing data, such as measuring air quality during reconstruction

Regulations Abound

That reporting, however, falls under what the FAA labels “commercial use.” For the agency charged with determining how drones can be used, such commercial uses mean stiffer regulation. Hobbyist users have constraints, as well, but commercial users now are required to get what’s known as Part 107 certification before using drones. Whether use of drones in journalism education qualifies as a commercial use is not a settled question. But the safe and responsible choice for educators looking to incorporate drones in class reporting projects is to ensure a 107-certified and sufficiently insured pilot in command is on hand for all drone flights. That may be the instructor or a student or a local journalist you partner with.

Jon Resnick of DJI covers the basics of flight during the drone training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in June 2017. (Photo courtesy of Al Tompkins)

Even if you’re never going to go for Part 107 or fly a drone, it’s important to understand the basic restrictions and share them with your students. Part 107 has many nuances and details, but most importantly, it bars:

• commercial use of UAVs weighing more than 55 pounds
• UAV flight above 400 feet above ground level in most cases (tall objects may involve variations on this)
• night flight
• flights over people not involved in the operation of the UAV
• reckless or careless operation
• flight in restricted airspace without permission (airspace restrictions vary based on size and location of an airport)
• flight beyond the operator’s visual line of sight

The FAA allows applications for waivers for such things as night flight or flight over people, though the latter is rare.

Considering Flight

Matt Waite, who founded the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska, says the first step for any educator considering using drones is assessing the terrain on your own campus, from how open your risk management staff are to your proximity to airports. “Insurance and risk are your biggest obstacles,” he says. “Many campuses have banned drones or put in place strict policies that aren’t friendly to journalism. You need to talk to your campus risk managers immediately.”

The next step is further due diligence. Waite notes the complexity of FAA rules and cautioned that it’s not enough to rely on students or others who claim they’re registered or licensed. Educators need to truly dig in and understand the legal environment and ensure that operations are safe and lawful.

“The consequence of you getting it wrong is your students facing $10,000 fines,” he says.

Poynter’s Al Tompkins, who organized the drone trainings at the universities of Georgia, Wisconsin and Oregon, as well as Syracuse, echoed this point. “Remember that a lot of students maybe are leisure users of drones,” he says. “It doesn’t make them experts. Think of it the same as social media. They may have developed unsafe habits that you have to break.”

He agrees with Waite that institutions will not take kindly to rogue drone use. “Your university would have, what we called in Kentucky, ‘a conniption fit’ if you did this without being licensed and insured.”

Tompkins cautions that educators may not fully recognize what he calls “a new harness of regulations” beyond what they’re used to with other tools. “You have First Amendment considerations, you have privacy considerations, you have safety considerations, you have other airspace considerations.”

Matt Waite of the University of Nebraska Drone Journalism Lab trains students in safe and responsible flight at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in June 2017. (Photo courtesy of Al Tompkins)

Bedrock Principles

Beyond the legal restrictions lay a series of ethical considerations that are essential in any classroom using drones. The Center for Journalism Ethics that I direct at the University of Wisconsin-Madison released a report this summer on public acceptance of drone use in news. We found a public modestly favorable toward these uses but clear in preferring them in certain types of reporting and not others. People are concerned about privacy, surveillance and paparazzi-type behavior.

The Center recommends transparency and accountability when using drones, including such things as always labeling drone footage and images and linking to means for the public to respond and ask questions. Tompkins says careful news media use, including by students, is critical in and of itself, but also as a means of preserving access to using drones as reporting tools.

“In some ways, we’re kind of in a pioneer mode right now,” he says. “If we do this well, we’re more likely to get the public’s trust and not get regulated out of existence. If we do this badly, we’ll have the opposite reaction.”

Ethical considerations apply whether you’re deploying the drone yourself or using material captured by someone else. If others violate FAA rules or ethical principles while gathering images or video, we ought not use it in our publications or broadcasts. “It’s like saying don’t steal but if you do steal, come over and sell it to me,” Tompkins says. “I want us to be careful not to encourage bad behavior by using it in our coverage.”

It’s also key to remember that drones should be incorporated within curriculum and not added on as some shiny new object in a dedicated course. Waite feels particularly strongly about this point.

“You shouldn’t teach a drone class any more than you shouldn’t teach a phone class,” he says. “The drone is a tool. A very useful tool, yes, but a tool nonetheless. So the trick is to incorporate drones into storytelling classes. Teach carpentry not hammer.”

Al Tompkins works with Madison broadcast journalist Steve Koehn during drone training at the University of Wisconsin in June 2017. (Photo courtesy of Becky Liscum)

Building a J-School Rep

One of the things I noticed as I have worked on research in drones is the healthy set of cross-campus connections I’ve been developing. Given that these tools can be useful in everything from monitoring crops to tracking whales — literally from agriculture to zoology — journalism schools can become campus leaders in demonstrating safe and responsible use, as well as influencing institutional policies.

“If mass communication departments become the brain trust of how to use these, other departments will come to you (and) get in on your expertise,” Tompkins says. “It’s a way to make your department relevant to everybody else.”

If you’d like to get in on this emerging trend, plenty of resources await you:

• Drone Journalism Lab, including its operations manual
• Test prep guide Tompkins and Waite recommend
• Center for Journalism Ethics drone report
• FAA Unmanned Aircraft Systems site
• Georgia Drone Summit at the University of Georgia Oct. 21 and 22

Kathleen Bartzen Culver (@kbculver) is the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching and researching at the intersection of ethics and digital media practices. Culver also serves as director of the Center for Journalism Ethics and was the founding education curator for MediaShift.

The post What You Need to Know About Drones in J-Schools appeared first on MediaShift.

“It’s been playing on my mind. I would hate this to have any repercussions on you,” she wrote, “I’m letting you know that you can pull out…if you fear for your safety.”

“I don’t want to pull out. I know and accept the risk,” I wrote back, “People are coming to harm and no one seems to care. I feel a moral obligation to publish. It’s idealistic and maybe foolhardy. But that’s my view.”

And so, on Sunday June 17 the trolling project’s flagship story hit the front page of Melbourne’s Age newspaper and Sydney’s Sun-Herald. It was also published online alongside a compelling video – something that was equal parts exciting and terrifying.

Terrifying because my main interview subject, Mark (not his real name), is a vicious and highly organized troll. As it explains in the link above, Mark could quite easily come after me and, in his words, “f*** up my life.”

Exciting because perhaps, after all these years of speaking out about the ways in which cyberhate can wreck lives and incite people to suicide, maybe now we’d finally see change. Maybe now law enforcement officers across the country would take cyberhate targets seriously.

People read the trolling articles in their thousands and the social media response was enormous. My email inbox filled up with responses to the investigation – mostly women telling me their own experiences of technology-enabled harassment and abuse.

“I felt hopeless for years. The light Ginger and others has shone on this is empowering,” Melissa tweeted.

Then came an almost inevitable tweet that made my heart sink.

Is the Daily Fail allowed to do this to your article? https://t.co/7NGbxs8dS2

— Julia (@Julaberry) June 18, 2017

Yet again, a Daily Mail (Australia) journalist had rewritten my painstaking work and published it under one of their journalist’s bylines. (Seemingly as a result of public pressure, the journalist’s byline has since been removed).

Less than six months ago, the Daily Mail and a couple of other publishers lifted a slab of my investigation into child abuse in much the same way. Much like the previous time, the public’s rage at this plagiarism rapidly took on a viral quality. Several of my tweets about this have had more than 30,000 impressions each.

Please retweet if you think @DailyMailAU @mcilveenl should pay my invoice & stop stealing the work of ethical journalists @withMEAA https://t.co/8mozhpJUrK

— Ginger Gorman (@GingerGorman) June 22, 2017

Even as I write this, I’m fielding calls from radio producers wanting me to discuss plagiarism on the radio. Australian media outlets The Guardian and Crikey have both written their version of events too.

One of the reasons the issue caught alight like wildfire this time seems to be because I sent the editor of the Daily Mail, Luke McIlveen, an invoice for the unauthorized use of my work.

Just to be clear – this was not primarily about the money. It was a political statement about the multitude of macro and micro damages caused when journalists continually cannibalize the original work of other journalists.

As heartened as I am to see the public take a stand against plagiarism, I’m also dismayed at the situation. As more and more salaried journalists are made redundant and the pressure of the 24-hour news cycle increases, this problem is likely to get far worse before it gets better.

To me plagiarism like this has very severe implications for an industry that is already in trouble. It also has massive implications for democracy as a whole. Which crucial stories will never be told if this behavior continues?

A common issue

Just like last time my work was recycled in this way, numbers journalists have contacted me to explain that this frequently happens to them too.

One of these people is freelancer Kylie Matthews. She sends me a list of six stories originally published on the popular Australian news website news.com.au and then repurposed elsewhere, mostly by the Daily Mail.

“For another journalist to take my work and put their own byline to it – without any credit given to the original source – it breaks my heart,” Matthews writes in her email to me.

“I put my heart and soul into my work and invest a great deal of time into my interviewees so they feel safe and trust me with their stories.

“When unethical journalists then come along and do these ‘secondary stories’, all my hard work is then destroyed and the reputations of those of us who are genuine and ethical are damaged.

“Many potential interviewees are put off and our whole industry is tarnished as a result. These days I find myself working very hard to reassure potential interviewees of my credibility and that they can trust me.

“I feel helpless almost every time it happens because there seems to be very little I can personally do to stop it from happening again and again. It’s gotten to the point now that I expect it,” she writes.

Her sentiments echo my own to such an extent, that I could have written them myself.

In the Daily Mail’s response to me via email, Kimberley Brunt, Assistant Managing Editor of Daily Mail Australia
writes that: “…there is no copyright in an idea.”

“Our journalists are free to follow articles in the media and, indeed, this practice is extremely common in the world of online journalism,” she writes.

Here I might point out that yes, it is common to follow up the reporting of other journalists.

However, the job of a journalist is to conduct their own interviews and verify the facts themselves – not to copy and paste someone else’s work.

In a tweet on this point, Fairfax columnist Caitlin Fitzsimons duly notes: “This was just lifted with no reporting added.”

Radio and TV news bulletins would barely exist without the work of print journalists. Historically we have all been ripped off for years

— Michael Lynch (@micklynch57) June 23, 2017

Grant’s email response also refers to the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and states: “We would rely on the defence of fair dealing.”

(Please note: The U.S. version of this copyright law is fair use.)

Murky law

Intellectual property lawyer Paul Noonan tweets me to say the “Daily Mail is confused.”

Either there’s no copyright infringement because it’s just an idea, Noonan says, or there is a copyright infringement “but they have fair dealing defense. Not both.”

And the law is where this gets extremely murky.

Matthew Rimmer is a Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation Law at the Queensland University of Technology. While he doesn’t wish to discuss the specifics of my case, he does explain that arguing over copyright in journalism is “an old story.”

“In colonial Australian states, special laws were minted to protect hot news from the telegraph. After federation, there were battles over copyright law and literary works. With mass media, there was litigation over television broadcasts.

“In recent years, there have been conflicts, particularly over the relationship between old media and new media,” Dr Rimmer says.

He points to three areas of the law that mine apply in a case like mine – copyright law, economic rights and moral rights.

“Journalist norms and standards play a role in informing interpretations of what is ‘fair.’”

“In Australia’s moral rights regime, industry standards and norms can be taken into account. For moral rights, there is a defence of reasonableness,” he says.

Meanwhile the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), an Australian union that represents more than 6,000 journalists, is gearing up for a fight.

Katelin McInerney, director of media at the MEAA, says “members report plagiarism of their work is on the rise.”

Despite this, she’s hopeful “collective action” will help turn the tide.

“This year for the first time, we have seen a group of freelancers and their supporters successfully rally to pressure a media company caught doing the wrong thing and plagiarizing another journalist’s work to retract the story.

“That happened at the beginning of the year when an Australian online publication was forced to take an article that had plagiarized another of Ginger Gorman’s pieces, after a bombardment of collective outrage on their social platforms forced them to remove the piece to avoid further embarrassment.

“This groundswell of anger and action…around making media outlets more accountable for paying freelancers for their work, and to hold companies accountable for plagiarism has seen MEAA members gearing up to continue the #journotheft action and take it bigger,” she says.

Ginger Gorman is an award winning print and radio journalist. Follow her on Twitter @GingerGorman or support her work on Patreon. A a group of freelancers and Gorman recently started a petition to stop plagiarism in journalism.

The post Journalism Rip Off: Is it ‘Following Up,’ Lifting or Straight Up Plagiarism? appeared first on MediaShift.

Is there anything in journalism that screams innovation more than drones? Since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) instituted new rules in 2016, unmanned aircraft equipped with cameras have become popular in newsrooms like Chicago’s CBS2, Norfolk’s The Virginian Pilot, and The New York Times. But should every news videographer be running out to get one?

Prof. Matt Waite discusses how the worlds of journalism and drones collide. (File photo from Matt Waite)

“The question is ‘what purpose is the drone serving in the story?’” says Matt Waite, a professor at the University of Nebraska who in 2011 founded the Drone Journalism Lab to study the technology and train journalists on the use of drones. Waite believes that incorporating drones into your newsroom is not that simple of a choice. Instead, like any shoot, the planning should be meticulous.

“I think it starts a long time before you even put your hands on the device,” he says. “It is not a casual thing that you can just go out and do. It requires forethought and planning, and for the pilot-in-command to do a lot of stuff even before leaving the building.”

As regulations stand right now, news organizations and journalism schools experimenting with drones fall under the rules for “commercial flights.” That means drone operators must be certified by passing the FAA’s 60-question, multiple-choice test. The good news? No flying capability demonstration is necessary.

According to Waite, any local TV station can have a drone unit up and running within two to six months. And most of that time will go into the planning.

“A pilot can pass that test with about 40 hours of study,” he explains. “It’s not hard, it’s just work. The bigger hanger right now in most newsrooms is internal. They are trying to figure out what type of legal parameters they should operate under.”

Do you have the budget?

Budgeting is also a concern, says Waite, especially for smaller newsrooms. A commercial drone kit will run between five and ten thousand dollars. “It is inexpensive compared to a manned helicopter,” Waite says, referring to the eyes-in-the-sky on which many local TV news stations rely. “Insurance issues are also slowing people down. General liability policies don’t cover aircrafts, so you have to get special insurance for this. And that is in the thousands of dollars a year.”

To address issues like that, Waite’s Drone Journalism Lab recently released an Operations Manual – with support from the Knight Foundation and available to anyone under a Creative Commons license – to help professionalize drone operations across newsrooms. Waite is also involved in a series of workshops with the Poynter Institute to train journalists and videographers to fly drones and get accredited by the FAA.

Be clear about the story first

Creative Commons photo.

Over the last few years, news organizations like the BBC, CNN, and Australia’s ABC have all been setting the standards for drone journalism. Waite is unsure how local TV stations and smaller newsrooms will manage with drones. He’s certain, though, that stations must decide why they’re going to use the technology before they put in the purchase order.

“They have to start with the question of ‘what is the drone giving us in this story?’” Waite says. “If the answer is ‘it is offering a perspective on this event that you can’t get from the ground that will greatly increase people’s understanding,’ I say rock on. That is exactly what it is for.”

And that’s exactly what Chicago CBS2 news director Jeff Kiernan recently told the Radio Television Digital News Association he expects from of a drone story. “In our twice-daily news conference, anyone can pitch a story, explaining how a drone could enhance it,” Kiernan told RTDNA.

This piece was initially published on Storybench, a cookbook for digital storytelling. Storybench is a collaboration between Northeastern University’s Media Innovation program, a new graduate degree in digital journalism, and Esquire magazine.

Felippe Rodrigues is a former law student turned sports writer and a big fan of the Olympics. He is currently a graduate student in Northeastern’s Media Innovation program.

The post What Local TV Should Know Before Taking Off With Drone Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

Stacy-Marie Ishmael doesn’t take photos of animals, or cute children or her lattes. Instead, her phone is full of screenshots of bad mobile news experiences. She has hundreds of them.

Ishmael is the former managing editor of mobile news for BuzzFeed, and during the past year she dived deeper into the mobile experience as part of her Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. In early May, she gave a talk at the University of Oregon about how design impacts mobile news readers and affects their levels of trust in the media.

Her outlook: Mobile news design is confusing, and often aggravating.

“It was only fairly recently, mostly coming out of education, that people have started to do research into how the way in which you consume something changes your relationship with the material,” Ishmael said. “Yet somehow, people in news and media, have gone blithely along, ignoring some of the other kinds of research that are coming out about our changing relationships with the products that we use.”

A few of the most critical issues Ishmael has identified include: over-simplified design conventions and the widespread use of advertorial content dressed up to look like news. Both of these phenomenon allow advertisers to trick readers into consuming their made-up content, and degrade audience trust in news, she argues.

That’s not a good thing, given that trust in the news industry is currently very low.

“It’s a real unusual spot to be in where both our sources and our potential subjects expect the absolute least from us,” Ishmael said. “We’re operating in a situation of negative trust. We’re not even at a baseline of zero, we’re at minus 100 and we have to figure out how to get from minus 100 just back to zero. Then we can talk about positive experiences.”

Throwing “chum” into the digital news waters

One of the things that aggravates Ishmael most about mobile news consumption is running into “chum.” That’s the term she uses for fake-news articles designed specifically to make readers look at advertisements.

Yes, “chum,” as in, the bits of decomposing that fishermen use as bait to get their prey riled up.

“The internet equivalent of chum is those terrible, super misleading ads and headlines you sometimes see at the bottom of news pages, that say things like ‘ten celebrities you didn’t know had died,’” she said. “You have this immediate reaction of ‘eew,’ or ‘really?’ and your brain can’t help itself. It’s absolutely designed to capitalize on your most basic emotions.”

These emotion-triggering advertisements seem to be inescapable. Ishmael has found them everywhere from the Washington Post to The Guardian to Bloomberg.

There’s no question that advertorial chum – the type of linking provided by Outbrain, Taboolla and others – makes big money for publishers. But at what cost?

“When you’re in an environment in which you’re like ‘oh, I could get money – or I could not. I could get money, I could hire some journalists, or I could lay everyone off,’ you will go for the chum boxes.” Ishmael points out.

“But when you do that, when you accept that, you set yourself up for being perceived as potentially less credible in an environment in which we already have low levels of trust. It’s a super no win situation.”

The “flattening” of design

One of the reasons chum makes news outlets look less credible is because it blends in with the real news. A primary reason for that, Ishmael argues, is the “flattening,” or over-simplification of news design.

“Design conventions in digital have gotten super boring, and very similar looking to each other,” she said. “We’re making it harder and harder and harder for people to know what they’re doing in digital, even as the environment in which we’re operating has gotten more and more complex.”

Demystifying: The “Flattening” of News and Its Consequences for Trust from UO SOJC on Vimeo.

Digital design does away with the kinds of visual cues that exist in newspapers, to let people know if they’re looking at editorial content or at a piece of advertising. And when news outlets use nearly identical templates to display content, Ishmael argues, readers get disoriented and feel deceived.

Even Ishmael, who is an expert at differentiating websites, has difficulty telling sites apart. Looking back at her screenshots, she often has to look at metadata to decipher which news outlets they came from, or if they came from fake-news sites.

“This is a problem. This is a real, genuine, maddening problem,” she said. “So when people tell me that it’s the responsibility of all of you – and the responsibility of all of us – to make sure that on a (small screen), or on a watch with notifications, somebody should instantly know if what they’re about to read was produced by Macedonian teenagers or the New York Times, I push back.’

Readers have “too much stuff to do”

Solving the trust issues that revolve around digital design takes a lot of attention, Ishmael points out. Unfortunately, attention is something in short supply.

“We already have too much stuff to do, and there isn’t enough of us to do it. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is that audiences also have too much stuff to do,” she said. “There’s always something else, and we are increasingly competing for smaller and smaller slices of your more and more fragmented attention.”

Audiences, who are constantly bombarded with content that may or may not be real, are unlikely to verify whether a source is credible, or take the time to research a story, Ishmael argues. At the same time, newsrooms are so busy keeping up with ever-evolving technology and social and digital news trends that it’s hard to allocate the attention needed to fix problematic digital conventions.

To work against these problems, Ishmael suggests that both audiences and news outlets need to take more responsibility. Readers need to stop sharing things on impulse, and redevelop a healthy sense of suspicion about what they’re reading, she said. Similarly, news outlets need to question whether allowing sensational chum boxes on their websites are right for their audience and brand, whilst also improving the design and user experience.

“None of this is easy to solve. And they are a series of independent problems that have happened to coalesce around this moment,” Ishmael said. “But, there’s a lot of opportunity to try and fix them.”

Sami Edge is a former University of Oregon journalism student, currently reporting and working on digital storytelling at The Santa Fe New Mexican.

The post Stacy-Marie Ishmael on the ‘Flattening’ of News and Its Consequences for Trust appeared first on MediaShift.

Back in 1835, many readers in New York ended up believing just such a tale. The New York Sun, then one of the city’s leading newspapers, printed an elaborate six-part series about exotic animals living on the moon (including human-like creatures with wings), purportedly discovered through a gigantic newfangled telescope. The source of the information was Sir John Herschel, who was an actual real-life astronomer but had nothing whatsoever to do with the Sun’s scoop.

Rough image of lithograph of “ruby amphitheater” described in the New York Sun newspaper in August 1835. Public domain image.

Somebody at the Sun (just who remains something of a mystery) made the whole thing up, in an effort to goose its circulation. The hoax did eventually unravel, although the newspaper never retracted the story.

Today, of course, we are battling similarly fake news, found not only in dark corners of the Internet but in mainstream venues such as Facebook. Yet, even in our “post-truth” world, it is still virtually unthinkable that a major newspaper in a major U.S. city would publish information that it knew to be demonstrably false.

Are journalists inherently more responsible today than they were in 1835? Are they simply less interested in building an audience for their work than their predecessors? No, and no. The difference is that today’s journalists operate within a system that provides the audience with confidence that what they are reading, hearing or watching is true—a system which developed organically and relies entirely on voluntary compliance.

In the 19th century, newspaper audiences had no reason to be confident in the veracity of what they were reading. Professional training for journalists did not exist, nor were there any widely accepted standards for how news should be gathered or produced. Many newspapers were also aligned with a political party and used their news columns to support a particular partisan viewpoint.

The Sun, which began publication in 1833, was at the vanguard of what was called the penny press—a low-cost, mass produced product that democratized access to newspapers beyond the well-to-do. But a mass publication required a mass audience, which led, regrettably, to travesties like the Great Moon Hoax.

This situation reached its nadir in the 1890s, with so-called “yellow journalism,” in which sensationalism, scandal and stretching the truth all became the order of the day. However, those excesses contained the seeds of journalism’s redemption.

A profession with professional training

Photo by Daniel X. O’neill on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

Reporters who recoiled at what the news business had become decided that if journalism was to become respectable, it had to be thought of as a profession. And a profession required professional training.

The first journalism schools emerged in the first decade of the 20th century at the University of Missouri and Columbia University in New York (the latter founded by Joseph Pulitzer, one of the chief progenitors of yellow journalism.) Journalism schools not only taught the basics of how to report and write a news story; they also inculcated journalists in a set of ethical and professional standards to guide them in their work, including a prohibition on overt partisanship in news coverage that came to be known as “objectivity.”

Walter Williams, founding dean of Missouri’s journalism school, encapsulated these standards in 1914 in a document he called the Journalist’s Creed, which asserted that public journals are a public trust and the journalist’s task is to serve the public good. The creed also says “accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism” and that “a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true.”

In other words, no room for moon hoaxes. Or fake news.

Because the First Amendment precludes government regulation of the news media in the United States, compliance with these professional standards was entirely voluntary. No force of law required news organizations to follow them, although almost all of them did.

Admittedly, this voluntary regime has been imperfect in preventing demonstrably false material from getting through audiences, but it has provided a degree of confidence in the reliability of news coverage that no other country can match.

Fake news and the concept of “alternative facts” have arisen today largely because people who have not been trained as journalists, or inculcated in journalistic values, are now behaving as journalists. Any fool with a computer can become a publisher, which inevitably leads to foolishness. And the temptation to do whatever is necessary to attract an audience is as strong today as it was for the publisher of the Sun back in 1835.

A swing back to trust

But the good news is that although the pendulum may have swung somewhat away from confidence in news credibility, history provides some comfort that it can swing back. Already, we are seeing news organizations partner with Facebook to flag and fact-check questionable material. People who care about facts, and having training in standards, are once again asserting themselves on the public’s behalf.

So the next time you read about Hillary Clinton operating a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor, don’t despair. People will eventually figure out there aren’t really animals on the moon.

Rich Shumate is a media historian and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida. He is a veteran journalist and former news editor at CNN.

The post Fake News Isn’t New; History Offers A Way To Fight It appeared first on MediaShift.

Nonetheless, fortified by plenty of pizza and the knowledge that the election would be an historic one, my students managed to sift through more than 3,000 tweets, commercials, newspaper stories, and TV news reports in the course of documenting a campaign that they found shrouded in negativity.

The students determined that Republican candidate Donald Trump was the subject of twice as many negative newspaper stories and more than six times more negative television news segments than his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The candidates helped fuel that negativity, most prominently through their use of Twitter. Though Clinton had more than twice as many positive tweets as Trump, she also had more than double the amount of negative ones. Similarly, though Clinton ran almost twice as many positive ads as her opponent, she also ran nearly a third more negative ones than Trump.

“It was shocking how negative they were toward each other,” one group of students wrote of the candidates. “It was annoying how they would avoid questions about their past. It was crazy how much they tweeted.”

University of Arkansas students in Raymond McCaffrey’s Media Ethics work on a 2016 Presidential Election project. Photo credit: Christi Welter, Graduate Assistant, University of Arkansas Center for Ethics in Journalism

Organizing the Project

If it takes a village to raise a child, as one of the candidates famously espoused, one needs a campus to help birth such a massive project. The staff at the Center for Ethics in Journalism joined with web experts on campus to help bring the students’ findings to the public.

A key assist came a week before the Fall 2016 semester began from the university’s teaching and faculty support center, which included a breakout session on group projects as part of its start-of-the-school-year workshop. We were told that these projects offered great opportunities to develop collaborative skills but also drew complaints from top students that they always seemed to get left doing most of the work. One proposed solution was to allow students to police their own groups by giving them the power to vote slackers off the island, so to speak. Instead, I set out to make the workload manageable so that it could be completed during class time and ensure that the final grade would reward students who participated.

Then of course there was the pizza, which was delivered to class as I convened the groups at the beginning of the semester. Three-dozen students were divided into nine groups organized according to the sequences they declared as journalism majors. Advertisements, tweets, and news stories were all analyzed as to whether they had a positive or negative tilt or if they were neutral in tone and also whether they delved into issues relating to race, ethnicity, and diversity. The Editorial News group examined front-page headlines in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the New York Times, and USA Today, which were available for free to students on weekdays. The Broadcast Radio/TV group analyzed opening weeknight news segments from either the CBS Evening News or the NBC Nightly News. The seven Advertising/Public Relations groups were assigned one day a week to analyze every tweet from the two candidates. The entire class helped study every TV advertisement produced by the two candidates.

As the campaign heated up, we improvised. The ads started being released so quickly that to keep up I started to assign specific commercials to individual groups. The Broadcast group became so bogged down that we limited the analysis to two network newscasts and then only the opening news segments. After Election Day, the Excel files that the groups had toiled over were merged into a master database. Students were then asked to look beyond the numbers and review prominent advertising, journalism, and public relations ethics codes so as to evaluate the conduct of the journalists and candidates alike.

Raymond McCaffrey, Director of the University of Arkansas Center for Ethics in Journalism, discusses project results with a student. Photo credit: Christi Welter, Graduate Assistant, University of Arkansas Center for Ethics in Journalism

Ethics and the Campaign

The Editorial News group had a relatively favorable view of the newspaper coverage: “All of the newspapers had biased moments toward both candidates, but overall their intent with news stories produced fair and balanced coverage of the campaign/election.”

But the Broadcast Radio/TV group wrote that the two network newscasts “had an overwhelming amount of more negative stories about Trump than for Clinton … We believe that the media seemed to indict Trump over negative news, and when Hillary had negative news it was simply presented as news. They weren’t biased against Trump as much as they were biased for Hillary.”

Students considered even the candidates themselves to be pushing the ethical boundaries. One Advertising/Public Relations group wrote: “For both of the candidates, many of their ads and tweets were unethical because of facts being made up and quotes/information being used out of context.”

Another Ad/PR group added: “Our main ethical concern was that, based on Twitter, the candidates relied on negative material, which occasionally included false content that went without being fact-checked.”

Another Ad/PR group raised concerns about the candidates’ truthfulness: “Sometimes they would flat out lie or bend the truth & not be totally forthcoming to the media. The candidates weren’t respectful to each other or especially the media. Trump was definitely too transparent with his (T)witter specifically — think before you tweet.”

Finally, another Ad/PR group raised concerns about “quite a bit of negativity surrounding the media, both through Twitter and television ads, throughout this Presidential election. The number of posts that were either attacking the other candidate or defending the attacks was abundant. Hopefully, this trend of negativity surrounding the media does not take root in the future.”

That future is the subject of the project underway with my Spring 2017 journalism ethics class, most specifically the media coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office and his corresponding use of Twitter. I continue to improvise, trying to progressively weed out the things that students hate about group projects, and to carry on with the things they like — namely the pizza.

Raymond McCaffrey is the director of the Center for Ethics in Journalism and assistant professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas. McCaffrey came to the University of Arkansas in 2014. He worked for more than 25 years as a journalist, including eight years as a staff writer and editor at the Washington Post. His career includes work as a reporter, columnist and writing coach at the Colorado Springs Gazette. McCaffrey holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Fairfield University, a Master of Arts in clinical psychology from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a doctorate in journalism studies from the University of Maryland.

The post Arkansas Journalism Students Consider Ethics of News Coverage, Social Media in 2016 Election appeared first on MediaShift.

A few hours after after Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, compared Syrian President Bashar Assad to Adolf Hitler, saying, “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II…You had … someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” the media speculation began. Where did Spicer get the idea to compare Assad to Hitler?

On Twitter, a liberal blogger named Yashar Ali pointed to a Fox News segment that had aired on April 10, featuring a Skype interview with Kassim Eid, a Syrian activist who has written about surviving an earlier gas attack, seen below on the TV News Archive. Eid said, “He displaced half of the country. He destroyed the country. He gassed women and children. Who can be worse than him? He’s worse than Hitler.”

Ali’s tweet was picked up later that afternoon by NJ.com in a report about the social media criticism following Spicer’s statement. At 4:50 p.m., Charlie Warzel, a reporter for BuzzFeed, posted a piece hypothesizing that the Fox Business News interview might have been the inspiration for Spicer’s statement.

Of course only Spicer himself knows if the Fox News report inspired his statement, which he eventually apologized for after several hours of harsh criticism. After all, he is certainly not the first public official to run into trouble when making statements about Hitler.

In an era where news no longer solely arrives on newsprint on front doorsteps, tracing the provenance of a statement, idea, story, or report across media platforms–social media, television, news websites–has become a common pursuit. This has been, perhaps, fueled by the president, who has made such references himself.

As a library, the Internet Archive can help. Our Wayback Machine preserves websites online, with more than 286 million websites saved overtime. And our TV News Archive provides an online, public library with 1.3 million shows and counting. Here we have the original source for many types of statements by public officials: news conferences, appearances before congressional committees, appearances on TV news shows, and more. The 60-second segment format allows for editing your own clips up to three minutes long and makes them shareable on social media and embeddable on websites.

For example, in February, Trump made a reference at a Florida rally about Sweden: “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.” Fact- checkers reported that nothing had happened in Sweden the night before.

Trump later tweeted, however, that his statement about Swedish problems was inspired by Fox News report.

My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2017

In that report, Fox showed an interview by a Swedish film maker, Ami Horowitz, who asserts that refugees are responsible for “an absolute surge in both gun violence and rape in Sweden once they began this open door policy.”

Robert Farley, a reporter for FactCheck.org, wrote that this claim is contested by “Swedish authorities and criminologists.”

Several weeks later, Trump credited a “talented legal mind” on Fox news as the source for his March 2017 tweet accusing former President Barack Obama ordering wiretapping of Trump tower during the presidential election.

Following Trump’s statement, Shepard Smith, chief news anchor for Fox News, said that “Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napalitano’s commentary. Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the president of the united states was surveilled at any time in any way, full stop.”

The question of how political rhetoric travels across media platforms goes far beyond the Trump administration. Media researchers are developing methodologies to track messages and stories as they travel across the news ecosphere. Understanding these phenomenon is essential in figuring out effective ways to improve overall media literacy and fight the spread of misinformation.

As an early experiment in making such research easier, we’ve been developing hand-curated collections of statements by public officials, starting with the Trump Archive and now branching out to creating archives (still in development) for the Congressional leadership on both sides of the party aisle: Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky.; Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D., N.Y.; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif..

We’re working now to develop partnerships to use machine learning approaches, such as speaker identification and natural language processing, to make our resources more useful for researchers. Ultimately, we’ll improve search to make it simpler to search across our different collections and types of media.

Nancy Watzman manages editorial content and relationships for the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive. She’s worked for a number of political watchdog and reform organizations, including the Sunlight Foundation, Every Voice, the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org), and the Center for Public Integrity. Nancy is co-author, with Micah Sifry, of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). She has also contributed to The Buying of the Congress (Avon Books, 1998), Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly. She is also director of strategic initiatives for Dot Connector Studio.

The post From Spicer’s Hitler Comments to Wiretapping to Sweden: Does TV News Fuel Political Rhetoric? appeared first on MediaShift.